“Switzerland provides charitable treatment for the elderly. Your father is covered, but you will have to pay for yourself.”
“Well, I, er—I’ll be fine. Just a bullet wound. Got the bullet out—Father did, I mean. And my neck—bandaged. I’ll be fine.”
“I’ll repack your bandages for you, out here, but that’s the best I can do. Please ask your father to sit there with the other new patients. Then seat yourself here so I can quickly tend your wounds.”
As I helped Silence to his seat, the nurse turned with chart in hand and headed for the surgical theater. I leaned over to Silence and whispered, “We’re in!”
“We’ll see.”
Not a moment later, the door to the surgical theater burst open, and out rushed a jowly doctor with eyes ablaze and fingers riling. “Where’s the amnesiac?”
The nurse strode out behind him and gestured to Silence. “Right here.”
“Excellent! Excellent!” The doctor gripped Silence’s good arm and levered him up from the chair. “Mr. Thomas, my name is Gottlieb Burckhardt.”
“Gottlieb …” Silence muttered. “That’s German for ‘God’s love.”’
“Come this way, Mr. Thomas. I have just what you need. Just the thing to restore your mind.”
15
ELECTROCUTION
My misgivings only deepen as I clap eyes on Dr. Gottlieb Burckhardt. The man’s wide eyes, florid cheeks, and slack mouth show that he believes he has just found his salvation. But why would I be this man’s salvation? What doctor ever greets a patient this way? “Gottlieb,” I say wonderingly. “That’s German for ‘God’s love.”’
He practically hauls me out of my seat and across the floor to the surgical theater. I glance back at Thomas, but he only nods, proud of the little deceit he has pulled off.
But who is deceiving whom?
Dr. Burckhardt ushers me into the surgical theater. The room hosts two examination tables surrounded by tiers of benches. Dr. Burckhardt guides me to one of the tables, arranged in a star shape with separate sections for head and body and legs and feet. “Guten Morgen. Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”
“Ah—English, actually.”
“Sit here, sir,” he says, patting the middle of the table.
I do sit.
The doctor goes to a closet, where he plucks out a strange contraption—a machine about the size of a breadbox, with a crank jutting out one end and thick black wires emerging from both sides. The wires are woven copper with a coating of black rubber over them, and each wire ends in a metal alligator clip.
“What’s that?” I ask.
The doctor crooks a look my way and says, “You’re an amnesiac, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Then I imagine you do not know of the Austrian inventor named Nikola Tesla.”
“I imagine I do not,” I respond.
“Nikola Tesla and scientists on both sides of the Atlantic,” begins Dr. Burckhardt with a professorial air, “have developed the therapeutic form of electricity—‘alternating current.’ Unlike the dangerously powerful ‘direct current’—which can slay an elephant—alternating current is as safe and therapeutic as bath water. This contraption—called an AC generator—has proved the most powerful device imaginable for restoring memory.”
I nod nervously, seeing the six black wires reach out spiderlike, each tipped in a steel pincer. “How does it work?”
“Well.” He lifts one of the clips and lets the jagged metal jaws slap shut again. “It’s very simple. I dip each of these clamps in a solution of lamp oil—yes, the same harmless spermaceti that lights your home—and clamp it to your flesh.”
“Where?” I ask.
He shrugs. “Ears, fingertips, and toes—the outer extremities. Your body completes the circuit.”
“You’re going to electrocute me?”
The doctor’s hands spread defensively before him. “Not electrocute. Electrify. This isn’t a lightning bolt, but alternating current—the very kind your brain uses day in and out. The alternating current will help sort out your own confused brain patterns, will help align them.”
It all seems to make sense—the science of it. I still have to wonder about that eager face, though, those smiling jowls. “All right. I’m ready.”
“Excellent,” says the doctor, pushing me to lie down on the segmented table and slipping my shoes off. The doctor seems to relish the preparations. He lifts one alligator clip, dips it into a jar of spermaceti, and fastens the thing to my right ear. He does the same with more clips—for the left ear, and the fingertips, and the toes. Then he retreats to the box and positions one hand on top and the other on the crank.
“What should I expect?” I ask.
“Health,” the doctor responds, and he begins to furiously crank the crank.
Electricity surges into my ears, my hands, my feet. At first, the energy feels like bees swarming me and stinging my skin. Then the voltage sinks deeper. It stands nerves on end and makes every muscle turn to metal. It delves deeper still, past muscle and into mind, into soul.
I see visions. It is like that twilight place between waking and sleeping, when your conscious mind gazes on the panoply of the unconscious … .
I see an upstairs study with books lining the walls and a cabinet filled with little cross-referenced cards: a murder, a theft, a rape, a betrayal. Names of the perpetrators and names of the crimes, lists of evidence, of tools used, of ways of using them.
And then, there are more visions—of a pipe at my lips, a bowl filled with fragrant tobacco and spewing blue smoke and smoldering with red embers. A breath moves through those embers, and one leaps free to fall on my palm and burn it—one of many little freckle scars on my right hand.
But something else is in my left hand now—the finely wrought, finely curved neck of a violin caught between thumb and forefinger, nestled in the soft couch of the palm, with fingers ambling languidly over the strings. There is a long song in the air, a long, low, melancholy song, a melody by Beethoven, pulsing slowly through the air, a sonata for piano that I have learned for violin—Moonlight.
And there is a listener beside me. He is a stocky man with an intelligent face and sensitive eyes. His skin is sallow, as if he had spent years beneath the Middle Eastern sun only to return for years beneath an English fog. He has a reddish mustache, this man, and a square jaw, and trained hands. I look upon this slumping figure, who takes in my violin playing as a drunkard takes in gin, and I see greatness in him. Greatness and friendship.
But then, the pain is too powerful.
I feel my body transfixed, like a Sioux brave pinioned to the prairie earth and waiting for the warriors to ride past and hurl their spears down into me. I feel stretched out, like the man on the cross to demonstrate the power of Roman rule over Jewish mysticism. I feel like the wicker man, deformed or demented or perverse, wrapped in a cage of reeds and entombed in fire by the Celts.
My every cell is on fire. They burst and burst and burst, giving up the water in them and turning the rest to fire—to burn and burn and burn.
16
IN DEFENSE OF SILENCE
Here’s the conundrum about nurses: the young ones are beautiful but incompetent, and the old ones are competent but ugly. When my complaint is mild, I seek out a young, beautiful nurse. She will take twice as long to dress my wound (and do half as good a job) as an old nurse, but her wide eyes, smooth skin, and rose-red lips—these have a healing power that well-applied bandages do not. When I’m in grave shape, though, I look for the oldest, ugliest nurse around. She will work with grim dispatch, doing exactly the right thing and not relying on weeping eyes or pouting lips to heal me.
The charge nurse at the Prefargier Sanatorium was ancient and hideous—and thus brilliant. She unwrapped my shoulder wound and picked two more bits of bullet from it and debrided it of dead flesh and sanitized it and stitched up the gulf, all while wondering why a young man would run for his life when his father was in mortal danger. She also redressed the wound on my neck
and taught me why Scotch—in any proof—is not equal to wood alcohol administered by an expert.
“All right. You’re fine,” she said, “better than you could’ve hoped—and for free. Now, you’ve got to get out of here. We’ve got no beds for folks that don’t pay”
I was about to agree—the streets of Bern are not inhospitable to the man who knows how to purloin an apple or a carrot—but then Silence screamed.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Treatment,” the nurse said solemnly.
“What sort of …” I stood up, trailing a final bandage from my arm and heading toward the beveled-glass window. Gazing through it, I saw a sight I couldn’t believe.
Silence lay there on some kind of segmented examination table, his neck and hands and legs tied down, and alligator clips clinging to ears and fingers and toes. Electricity vaulted through him—arms flexing against his bonds, abdomen clenching above the main table, legs arcing as energy moved through them. His electrified figure formed the shape of a pentacle—a five-pointed star—but there was something more. Silence’s spirit seemed to be driven up from his body, an ectoplasmic presence that roiled in the air. It was as if this electric therapy had exorcised his soul from his body.
I thought of my plenary worm … dead one moment, electrified the next, and alive the third. But that had been science. This was—exorcism.
I looked to Dr. Burckhardt, who crouched beside Silence and cranked the demonic box that sent charges through him.
“No!” I shouted, and pushed open the door and rushed forward to grab the box that the doctor cranked. “No!” I cried again, and pulled the wires loose from Silence and hurled the box away It slid, sparking, across the tiles of the operating theater.
“You!” shouted Dr. Burckhardt. “Out! Out, I say!” He grabbed my newly bandaged shoulder and hauled me out of the operating theater and dragged me across the floor of the waiting room. Ahead of us, a semicircle of insane people seated around the perimeter of the room pulled their feet up from the floor as we passed, as if we were floodwaters. Reaching the double doors of the sanatorium, Dr. Burckhardt barked a few words in German and hurled me out onto the stone steps.
I tumbled to a halt, shaken, bruised, and not a little bit annoyed. You haven’t been thrown out of a place until you have been thrown out by someone barking at you in German.
My plan had failed.
For a scamp, there’s nothing worse than a failed plan. It is as if a carpenter built a shed that fell down, or a priest baptized someone, accidentally, into the worship of the devil. A failed plan for a scamp—or for a scientist, and I was both—meant that I was perhaps too inept at my chosen profession to survive.
I sat on the steps that Silence and I had scaled and took stock of my situation. “I wonder if I’ll ever see him again.”
All right, Thomas, I thought, you’re in a spot now—kicked out of an asylum with Silence kicked in. What’s your next brilliant plan?
I had a heavy feeling in my gut. What was it: responsibility? No. It was stronger than that. Guilt? Honestly? I’d already saved Silence five times over, and I didn’t owe him a sixth … . But I couldn’t just leave him in the hands of that mad scientist and his brutal breadbox.
Think, Thomas! Think! I stood up and walked down the steps. Something about the rhythm of feet on pavement—it always untangled my thoughts. How could I get in? I couldn’t return as a patient. Nurse Cragface would recognize me right away. I couldn’t disguise myself as a doctor—not young as I was, dressed as I was, with a British accent. If only they had a maintenance crew, or a carpentry crew, or an exterminator … .
I imagined myself in a pair of overalls, a metal cylinder at my waist and a spray nozzle in my grip. “I haff come to spritz zee rats!” Laughing, I stepped into the street …
And was nearly run down by a four-wheeled phaeton. The horse whickered at me, and the driver knocked me back with the butt of his whip. He growled something in German: “Ver-dammter Tourist!”
I staggered back. Well, that would’ve been one way into the hospital—or the morgue.
A lamplighter passed by, carrying a wick stick in one hand and a slender ladder in the other. He leaned the ladder against a lamppost, climbed, reached up with his lighting stick, and flicked the glass open. The wick darted in to ignite the lamp, and then he flipped the glass closed again. I looked to the light, only then realizing how dark the sky was becoming. A black ribbon of soot rolled up from the lantern and twisted into the night sky.
There was something in that smoke—the key to my predicament.
I turned toward the sanatorium and saw a similar line of smoke drifting from the top of a cigar-shaped smokestack. The smoke waved to me and then swept down in a gray ribbon across the street before dissipating on the wind. There was a faint stench in it, the stench of burned flesh.
“Crematorium!” I said in glee. I was, perhaps, the first person in the history of the world to say that word that way. Trying to clamp down on my enthusiasm, I strode excitedly toward the smokestack. A wooden fence shielded it from the road, sheltering an alley just wide enough for the ash man to wheel his cart up and shovel out the bones and ash.
Ah-ha! The ash clean-out. I reached down to grab the large metal handle and pulled. A six-foot-long drawer slid out on hidden rollers, revealing a wide pan filled with ashes and bones. Heat rose from the remains—not killing heat, but the spanking radiance of spent coals. With a final glance behind me, I brushed back the waste, curled up in the drawer, and gingerly rolled myself into the incinerator.
As the drawer slid closed, darkness enveloped me. Darkness and heat. I reached up, feeling the warm edges of a brick chute, and above it, wide-spaced bars that were crusted with grease. I shoved on the bars, and the whole grillwork lifted loose. Then I scampered up through it, pushed open the incinerator door, and climbed out onto the tiled floor of the crematorium.
“I’m in!” I said to myself excitedly.
“Qu’est-ce que c’etait?” someone else said in the nearby hallway. Footsteps approached.
I had to hide, but the room was small and bare. Fighting every instinct, I opened the incinerator door and climbed back in, closing it behind me.
I heard the men step into the room. They whispered suspiciously to each other, and their voices grew nearer. One of the men barked something that made me lurch, my foot striking the incinerator door with a bang. I stilled myself, held my breath, even kept my eyeballs from moving. I lay there in that stiff terror for three long seconds before hearing the creak of the incinerator door lifting.
“Merde!” one of the men said as he clapped eyes on me.
I held still, legs and arms and body and lungs and all and tried to play dead. Out of my peripheral vision, I could sense that they were blinking in disbelief, their mouths hanging wide. In time, movement came to those slack jaws. They spoke to each other in brusque whispers, nodded once in unison, and eased the door of the incinerator closed.
I breathed again at last.
Then the blue flames burst out below me.
I smashed against the incinerator door, bashing back the two faces that had been just outside, and dropped to the floor. Little flames clung to my clothes, but I rolled over to extinguish them. The men danced back and shouted in consternation—giving me room to roll until the fires were out. Wide-eyed and terrified, I stopped on hands and buttocks and heels and stared up at the two men.
“I’m alive!” I said. “I’m alive!”
They returned my amazed look. “Pas encore une fois.”
One man shut off the gas, and both swept forward, hoisted me, and carried me toward the door of the crematorium. With their free hands, they brushed off the ash that clung to my clothes. When I tried to explain, one man clamped his hand over my mouth, and the other man shushed me.
They conveyed me out of the crematorium and up a long white stairway. At its top, we passed through another hall and into a ward that was lined on both sides with beds. Anguished souls la
y in them in various states of consciousness. With another shush, the men carried me to an empty bed, dragged back the covers, shoved me in, covered me up, and stalked nervously away.
I struggled to hold still, but laughter jiggled up in my throat. I couldn’t hold the sound and let loose. My giggles turned to chortles to guffaws that rang from the vault above. Luckily, insane laughter was commonplace in the Prefargier Sanatorium.
After the jag was done, I lay still and felt the sweetness of the silence, the softness of the pillow, the sense that nothing could harm me. I felt invulnerable.
It was time to find Harold Silence.
Sliding my legs out from under the covers, I stepped out across the ward. The first bed held an ancient fellow. His leathery face was surrounded by a shock of white hair and a beard that shuddered with each voluminous snore. Obviously not Silence. The second bed held a young man who watched me with cloudy eyes and moaned, “Clarice … Clarice … Clarice …” I stalked past another blasted soul, and another, but none was the blasted soul of my friend. I checked every bed in the ward, but no Silence.
Creeping to the doorway of the ward, I looked out. Beyond was the circular receiving room with another ward opening on the other side. Smack in the middle, however, sat Nurse Cragface. She continued her grim itemizations, her eyes as keen as they had been two hours before.
I’d never get past her, unless …
Retreating to the nearest bed, I stooped down in hopes of finding—yes, a metal bedpan. As I gingerly lifted it from the floor, I discovered it was full. “All the better.”
I judged the distance between me and the poor sod who was muttering “Clarice,” cocked the bedpan in my arm, and hurled it. The missile flew with a wobbly motion over three sleepers, its contents sloshing ominously, before it descended. The metal pan struck the foot board of the young lunatic’s bed, clanging monstrously, and then plunged to hit the tiles with a wet, tumbling racket.
The young lunatic shouted, “CLARICE!”
Hard-soled shoes clacked beyond the door, approaching, and I ducked down into a shadow beside one bed.
The Shadow of Reichenbach Falls Page 7